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The power of principle

It is hard to defy the wisdom of the tribe, but resistance to injustice has never been more necessary. Susan Sontag pays tribute to the heroes of past struggles and to the moral courage of Rachel Corrie and the Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories

Saturday April 26, 2003

The Guardian

We are all conscripts in one sense or another. For all of us, it is hard to break ranks; to incur the disapproval, the censure, the violence of an offended majority with a different idea of loyalty. We shelter under banner-words like justice, peace, reconciliation that enroll us in new, if much smaller and relatively powerless communities of the like-minded; that mobilise us for the demonstration, the protest, the public performance of acts of civil disobedience not for the parade ground and the battlefield.

To fall out of step with one's tribe; to step beyond it into a world that is larger mentally but smaller numerically - if alienation or dissidence is not your habitual or gratifying posture - is a complex, difficult process. It is hard to defy the wisdom of the tribe, the wisdom that values the lives of its members above all others. It will always be unpopular - it will always be deemed unpatriotic - to say that the lives of the members of the other tribe are as valuable as one's own.

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[ 27 April 2003: Message edited by: rasmus_raven ]